When John Canfield took his family to Everett, Wash., to go crabbing last weekend, he had a vision of enjoying tasty seafood with melted butter.
Instead, he had a vision of Jesus Christ on one of his crabs.
Or, if you prefer, Osama Bin Laden.
The Canfields didn't even notice the Christ-like crustacean while it was in their presence, according to MyNorthwest.com and it was only while they were watching a video of their encounter that they noticed one of the crabs had the image of Jesus Christ on its belly.
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Except a lot of people who've seen the video, such as the editors of Gawker, don't think it look likes Jesus, but like notorious terrorist Osama Bin Laden?
GALLERY: SACRED SIGHTINGS
Sacred Sightings?
Sadly, the video of the crab is the only evidence that remains. MyNorthwest.com journalist Chris Sullivan, who broke the story, said the family threw it back in the water because it was a female, and not legal to keep.
He believes that the family is telling the truth about the sighting, but admits his opinion is changing on what the image looks like.
"[It] looks more like Osama every time I see it," he told The Huffington Post by email.
Barring some form of divine intervention, the Christ Crab may be permanently at the bottom of Puget Sound and unable to be analyzed.
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However, researchers at Northwestern University led by Joel Voss say there may be a more scientific explanation for why people see Jesus -- or, in this case, Osama Bin Laden -- in crabs, pizza, sides of cliffs or grilled cheese sandwiches.
It seems the human brain is wired to look for familiarity and meaning in the most abstract squiggles and then organize them according to type. That’s why we can look at a baseball cap and a fedora and know right away that both are hats.
To arrive at this finding, researchers asked 10 volunteers to look at squiggles while lying under a brain scanner and then rate the meaningfulness of each squiggle.
When the volunteers saw the images for a second time, they had catalogued these squiggles as faces or animals or something else that was meaningful to them and, therefore, had no reason to analyze the shapes again.
That may explain why some people who've seen the "Cross-tacean" think it looks more like Osama Bin Laden.
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